


how i met your brother

by judypoovey



Series: all i wanted would become everything i ever loved [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-09
Packaged: 2018-09-16 00:50:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9266435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judypoovey/pseuds/judypoovey
Summary: The power goes out, so Chirrut forces the kids to listen to the epic (not really epic) tale of how he and Baze first met. It is expectedly ridiculous.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is ... so ridiculous. I honestly apologize.

The rain didn’t seem to be ceasing any time soon, Bodhi mournfully noted as they all gathered to stare at the rapidly flooding courtyard. Monsoon season had come to Jedha City. Public transportation was shut down until the rain stopped, and classes were cancelled.

Cassian, Jyn, Bodhi, Kay, Baze and Chirrut were trapped in Baze’s apartment, trying to watch television and stay dry. Bodhi was kind of happy to get some of his homework pushed back, because he had been procrastinating it in order to teach Luke how to play soccer. (Which was adorable but soon Luke would be better than him and his pride couldn’t handle it.)

But now that rainy season had come, they were unable to do much of anything except superhero movie marathons and trying to ignore that Baze was thwarting Chirrut’s attempts to do something inappropriate under their blanket.

Until the power flickered and died.

“This is inconvenient,” Kay said.

“You already know how it ends,” Cassian shot back.

“I know how all movies end. It’s a simple matter of statistics.” Kay shrugged and made that lofty expression only 15 year olds could achieve.

“What are we going to do now?” Bodhi asked them. Jyn was dozing off on Cassian’s shoulder and gave him a small grunt in response.

“Why don’t I tell you guys a story?” Chirrut asked.

With anyone else, they would have groaned and said ‘no’ and probably thrown popcorn at whoever offered to tell a story during a power outage. But Chirrut told the best stories. They were almost always over the top and usually one hundred percent fake, but they were at least fun, and usually he tacked on a fake moral at the end.

Like, Chirrut tells the story of putting 8 guys in the hospital for harassing his girlfriend way back in the day.  It was a very important tale on the importance of respecting women.

(Bodhi had googled that one and it had actually turned out to be true.)

“What kind of story?” Cassian asked, suspicious. “There are young ears, Chirrut.” He gestured to Kay, who protested with a ‘hey!’. He had good reason to be mistrustful, because censoring himself was not one of Chirrut’s strengths.

“It’s not explicit,” Chirrut said, moving to sit down on the ottoman so he was in front of the rest of the apartment as they closed in.

“This is the story about how I met Baze,” he said, clearing his throat, as if this was quite important.

“We know how you met Baze, Chirrut,” Jyn said, sitting up and yawning. “You flexed in front of the window for three weeks before Baze finally took you in a manly fashion,” she explained, covered Kay’s ears as she did. He wormed out of her grip with a snort.

“We already knew each other,” Baze corrected.

“What?” Bodhi demanded.

Chirrut was smiling. “We went to the same boarding school. We weren’t friends back then,” he said. “Baze was the star athlete, very popular. And I wasn’t.”

“Don’t say it was because you were blind, it’s because you tried to fight everyone,” Baze interjected immediately. “ _Literally_ everyone. Even the janitor.”

No one was surprised.

“He deserved it.” Chirrut snorted. “Let me tell the story, Baze. It’s tragic.”

“It’s not _tragic_.”

“Okay, so me and Baze dated in college.”

\--

Chirrut was freshly 18 and a freshman in university. Of course, navigating campus was tricky the first few weeks, because blind. But after a while, he got it down to a science. His first class of the week was a basic philosophy class that almost all freshman had to take. He sat near the back, his recording taking his notes as he lounged.

Sometimes, the benefit of having to record his lectures, Chirrut liked to nap in this class.

Someone nudged his leg one day.

“You know, your snores are gonna drown out your recording if you keep this up,” he whispered.

(Yes, that was Baze. He was a sophomore but he had procrastinated taking this particular class.)

“I do not snore,” he said, but paid extra mind to stay awake. “But if my recordings are useless, maybe you could share your notes,” he added as class was dismissed and he began packing up his things.

“You live on campus?”

“First floor, room to myself. I don’t have class now…” Chirrut clearly assumed something was going to happen here, because he tends to assume the weird things like that. He let Baze into his room.

“How do you get around with such a mess on the floor?” he asked. Chirrut assumed he meant his clothes, which were much more useful to him out than they were in a drawer.

“I’m just used to it,” he said, sitting on the bed and kicking off his shoes. “I’m Chirrut, by the way. You’re Baze Malbus. I don’t know if you remember –”

“Not remember the blind guy who tried to fight everyone in school? Hardly. How did you know who I was?”

“I’m magic,” he deadpanned. “I heard the teacher ask you a question. I’m not deaf too.” He could hear the rustling of papers. “We’re going over notes?”

Baze paused. “Of course. That was the point, right?”

Chirrut smiled. “It’s university. I had other things in mind,” he said.

There was a long silence. “I saw your last test score. I think I _should_ help you study. But…there’s a party this Friday, if you want to come with me…” There was innuendo in that invitation. “But only if you promise not to pick any unnecessary fights.”

Pretending to contemplate this, Chirrut nodded. “Sure. Sounds fun. But you have to back me up if anyone picks a fight with _me_.” He had not been inviting to any college parties yet, and he thought it sounded like it was going to be fun, especially if Baze was going to have his back.

“Deal.”

The party came around and Baze ‘picked him up’ from his dorm.

\--

“So you met and had sex at a college party? That’s not a great story,” Cassian interrupted.

“That is not what happened,” Chirrut corrected sharply. “Be quiet.”  
\--

The party went well. Chirrut didn’t drink much because well, he was already blind, he didn’t also need to be stumbling like a fool. Baze drank modestly with his friends, but seemed to be having fun talking to Chirrut.

A girl bumped into them at one point. She turned to apologize and gasped at the sight of Chirrut, which was weirdly uncommon.

“I’m sorry but,” she said, her drink sloshing down her hand. “You are really beautiful. Have you ever thought about becoming a model?”

Chirrut was surprised (not about his own beauty, of which he was quite confident, but of someone’s appreciation of him) and shook his head. “No, I haven’t. Are you offering?” he asked.

“Definitely!” Now, if that seems like a weird turn of events, it was. You don’t often bump into a model at a party and get invited to be a model.

(No the Force did not provide you a modeling career, Chirrut, don’t even start.)

Somehow the evening that had become derailed into the girl giving him all the details of this modeling situation. Chirrut wasn’t sure when Baze walked away, but it took him almost ten minutes to find him again, and Baze was fairly surly about the whole thing, so he went back to his new friend, a little disappointed.

\--

“So Baze walked off and you slept with the model girl, didn’t you?” Bodhi asked.

“Of course I did.”

“Well, no wonder he was annoyed.”

“He could have joined.”

“Young ears!”

\--

The following Monday, Chirrut officially had a job modeling and was doing life modeling for an art class just for kicks. Baze did not sit next to him in philosophy. Chirrut hit him with his walking stick on the way out the door. “What happened to you this weekend?” he asked.

“You seemed distracted,” he said.

“I was still looking forward to hanging out with you,” Chirrut said, feeling a little petulant. “It was rude of me to get distracted. You should allow me to make it up to you.” He grinned and Baze, and had to assume Baze smiled back, because when he offered his arm, Baze took it. They walked back to Chirrut’s dorm and –

\--

“We can skip this part,” Cassian said, hands over Kay’s ears.

“In short, it was _amazing_.”

\--

They never really agreed they were dating. Baze was busy with his studies, of which he was growing increasingly disenfranchised with, and Chirrut was enjoying being the subject of drawings and photographs and sculptures. He hadn’t seen any of them, but he assumed they were good.

This progressed for some months, the two of them casually hanging out.

Baze came to visit him one day when he was on the set of a magazine shoot. “Having fun?”

“Yeah, definitely,” he said, listening to the lecture from his last class as someone touched him up with makeup. “I’m glad you’re here, I’m starving. Want to get dinner with me after?”

This was the first time either had asked the other out. Their time together had mostly been confined to underneath dubiously clean sheets.

Baze got to pick the place for dinner, and they became those infuriating people who sat on the same side of the booth, under the pretense of Baze reading the menu to Chirrut, but mostly because they wanted to occasionally grope each other under the table and giggle the way teenage boys were prone to.

“So, are we…” Baze asked. “Dating?”

“Do you want to date?” he asked. Chirrut had never really dated anyone. Of course, he had done things with people. He was a _model_. But dating felt like something that should be slightly more selective, and Chirrut was less than selective when it came to sleeping with people.

\--

“So you were a big slut?” Jyn asked.

“Pretty much,” Baze said, while Chirrut protested.

“There’s nothing wrong with open expression of sexuality. The Force –”

“Finish the story!” they all yelled at once.

\--

“I’d like to date you,” Baze said, very politely, because the waiter had just brought them more water. “Exclusively.”

Chirrut thought it was nice that Baze was jealous over his model colleagues, even though he had very little to fear in that department. If they were going to date, they were _really_ going to date. “All right, then. Your adoring fans will be very disappointed.”

“It’s not my fans I’m worried about,” he said, very sarcastically.

So now, they were dating. Of course they were the envy of campus (“No we weren’t,” Baze said.), and everything was pretty good. They were both theology majors, so they got to share a lot of classes, even though Baze was a year older than Chirrut.

\--

“If you were so perfect, what happened?” Bodhi asked.

“Well if you would stop interrupting I’d get to that,” Chirrut said. “I know you’re rolling your eyes Baze.”

Baze had indeed been rolling his eyes, but when wasn’t he?

\--

What happened was that Baze dropped out of school.

“I’m just being practical,” he said, more than a little dismissive. He had been doing the bounty hunter thing as a side job for a month now. He was a junior in college, and they had been seeing each other for close to a year, all together.

(“I thought you were a private detective,” Kay intoned, having been told the old lie all of the kids were told until they were old enough to realize the truth.

“I am. Kind of.”)

“You make more money doing modeling than you’ll ever make as a scholar, Chirrut. I make more money doing this. What’s the point of devoting yourself to something that’s just not going to benefit you in the long run?”

Chirrut had all kinds of responses lined up on a sharp tongue, but for once, he chose to be silent as he sat in his dorm, his arms crossed over his chest. The silence seemed to give Baze more pause than any shouted insults would.

“Chirrut – ”

“Who am I to judge you for your life choices?” he asked, his tone dull. “If you want to gallivant around the city hauling around criminals, go ahead. It’s not my problem.”

Baze was sitting next to him and he could feel him subtly shift away from him. “Are you breaking up with me?”

Chirrut had never broken up with someone, considering he’d never dated someone before. So he wasn’t actually sure if that was what they were doing. “I mean. I’m just being practical,” he said, throwing Baze’s own words back in his face. “You’ll be all over the place for work and I’ll be busy with my studies for at least two, if not four, more years. We won’t even have time to date. I’d hate to tie you down.”

Baze got off the bed. “Fine, if you’re going to be like that,” he said. “I don’t understand why you’re mad.”

If Baze didn’t understand how running off to beat up criminals instead of being a two-minute walk away from Chirrut might be upsetting, Chirrut wasn’t going to explain it to him.

Actually, okay, he was.

“You won’t be around anymore!” he snapped, not trying to monitor his volume anymore. “Sitting around waiting for you to show up or call sounds like misery. There’s no need for it.”

No argument came from Baze, he just left. So Chirrut was alone, and that was that.

Well, until ten years later when he found Cassian dumpster diving outside of his favorite restaurant. Then he had some company.

(“You dated a supermodel like five years ago. I remember the news report about the fight. Stop acting like you were a hermit.”)

\--

“And then I moved in across the way and Baze came running back,” Chirrut concluded happily.

“Came _running_ back? You pranced around naked for three weeks trying to get my attention!” Baze protested.

“It took that long for you to get the hint, I apologize,” he said, sniffing disdainfully.

“You were the one who broke up with me, forgive me for assuming you weren’t interested anymore.”

Bodhi knew this particular fight would go around in circles for hours, so he just got up and started making some hot chocolate for everyone as the rain poured down outside and the two supposedly responsible adults in the room affectionately bickered over their college breakup over a decade ago.


End file.
